grizzly beta

A Grizzly Bear featurette in the Village Voice

Since the first paragraph mentions a recording by Ed Droste's Great Aunt Marla, here is said song. Apparently, someone in the family got all roots and discovered a stack of these wax pressings she had made in the 1930s that fell on deaf ears and digitized them. I believe Ed told me that there is no documentation of what the original song titles were and whatever sheet music that accompanied them is long-lost now. This is a beguiling little tune though: secretarial, quirky, stressed.

The Bear's read of it devastates me, as does the string arrangement done by the Final Fantasy gent. It's one of my favorite moments of the year. The quotidian items listed here take on a more portent tone on Yellow House, to where they feel as if they are falling from the narrator's grasp, slipping away irretrievably. A despair acts as doppelganger in its stead, and under such a cloak of normalcy, edges closer, the singer that much closer to the edge of that which is unnameable.

"Unknown" by Marla

heep see

Magik Markers/ Excepter
August 19th
East River Park

After the last time, I had to give Excepter a rest, but the thought of them performing before the lumbering trajectories of trash barges and speedboats on the East River titillates. Sans watch, I have no concept of time and as I shuffle up, they are wrapping cables in the clamshell, Fell muttering in a bullhorn far from the stage.

Nick Sylvester is (perhaps mistakenly) accredited with floating the theory that Elisa and Leah of Magik Markers, rather than emulate the phallic wankery of rock's past, instead proffer a sapphic version of same self-dating moves. It would explain how hairy, wet, and sloppy Magik Markers shows can be, even with Leah nowhere to be seen and instead two dudes in throwback jerseys "manning" git and bass. Truthful or not, such a viral theory infects the experience, so that when Elisa gets down on her knees to lick her guitar and mic, lots of pale boys begin taking notes. I myself wonder if there's a little toggle switch to be flicked. Elisa is also prone to clutch her guitar tightly to her chest like a bookbinder, hiding her body like a prude as she walks down those high school corridors of her mind.

Stars Like Fleas + Shape-Note Choir
August 22nd
Tonic

Do you know quite what it takes to look up into the firmament and see it quiver and spin? Do you know just how altered the skull has to be to make the eyes tremble so that the stars spin and jump around like Everclear? Lord knows I've had LCD displays do it and it ain't pretty. Although I haven't seen them previously, I am quite familiar with certain aspects and tendencies of Stars Like Fleas. An old bandmate plays with them and there were many wasted nigh--mornings where I had their early recordings auditioned. At that time, about the only impression left the morning after was how taken they were with Talk Talk's Laughing Stock.

It's hard not to like a band that feels similarly as I do about the stullying boundaries of words, genres, songs, and pushes through that and moves outwards, yet takes it all with them, in the hopes of embracing it all. Tendrils of free jazz, laptop noise, post-rock, chamber strings, and folk mingle, entwine, and converse like some intimate cocktail party. Tonight, they attempt to meld with a 15-person shape-note choir. Before you say "o brother," know that I only cop to the "red" Harry Smith set myself, but no one, least of all the band, quite knows how this ambitious experiment will work out. Rather than the 21-person sprawl they can conjure on-stage, Fleas are trimmed to nine or so, their improvisational off-the-handle tendencies tempered as they seek to find a middle ground with the choir.

My main problem with the show is that there isn't quite enough sonic space for the shape-note singers. Unmic'd, it's hard to discern their voices and even when they are audible, the voices themselves are not quite distinct, sharp, boisterous, or chaotic enough (my favorite aspects of this so-called anti-choir). Early on, the two entities entangle and try to find a place to be, but it seems as if everyone is reticent. About 3/4s through the Fleas's set, it all falls in, the group reigned in yet spacious enough, the choir comfortable and fortified, enough so that the whole thing lifts heavenward (as choirs are wont to do). The performance winds down with hollers of "Hallelujah." Myself, emboldened by enough Maker's Mark and the realization that I too am part of the choir, warble along.

Joanna Newsom
August 24th
McCarren Pool

In one of the few instances of the night where Joanna Newsom revisits one of her old songs off of The Milk-Eyed Mender, a line from "Sadie" sticks out: "And all that I've got...I tie in a knot that I lay at your feet." Whereas last time around she could lay down some crocheted placemats, fine and small, Joanna's Newsongs are more like plunking down The Unicorn Tapestries. Which is to say, they're immense, archaic, epic, to where by the end of each piece, it's hard to see all the way back to the beginning. I can't quite call them songs or even suites, in that there are no discernible choruses or verses. Instead, we get stacked stanzas, dizzying imagery, a continual deluge, the universe pouring through and spilling like milk.

If anything, the previews from Ys are structured more like classical music. How the Van Dyke Parks orchestrations will flesh out or buoy such leviathans, I'm not certain, but the canvas is of a similar size. The scope is hard to fathom or assimilate, the imagery, the wordplay, the harpwork is just too much to absorb in one pass. While the rain cloud ceiling provides a pink-rimmed break in their gray opacity for her set, McCarren Pool is not ideal (not that I've found it to be a quality venue anyway), in that the crowd's attention span wanders but two minutes into each Newsong, to where the gossamer details, the golden purls, and exquisite stitchwork quickly gets swallowed and lost in the babble and text messaging. Where's a trash barge when you need one?

Joanna killed it.

the last beta

"Think of it as the use of film as film, as an artist uses paint as paint." -- Dennis Hopper

Does Beta like meta? Enough to mention that one time I got tooootally Walter Benjamin-ed so as to suffer through that tedious acid trip sequence from the end of Easy Rider? Enough to pine for a feature-length version of that scene so that it properly recreates the purgatory of an acid trip, ideally with someone who won't stop babbling about how "Jesus was a freedom fighter"? Enough to wish that it also referenced Dennis Hopper's past as an extra in two-bit TV westerns? Or better yet, what if that guy obsessed with Jesus and Billy the Kid was in fact Hopper? Wouldn't that be tidy?

Lucky me, The Last Movie was recently revived at Anthology Film Archives, some two decades on after Hopper's dead career was. When such an announcement is made to acquaintances, the response glibly goes: "Life is too short to watch The Last Movie." Ah, but what is time when the title sequence appears an half-hour in? Hopper is mad about that gear grind, the opening of the film layering the chimes of rock chisels and church steeples so that they too ring like ceremonial bells, like some cosmic cuckoo clock. It's a sound that synch only inside his skull, much like the idea of The Last Movie probably screened better behind his eyelids after licking toads down in Peru than it does in the projection room.

Brother, have I ever been there: imagining the idyllic tomes writ by Adam when in Eden; the softcore papyrus destroyed in the Library of Alexandria; the galleys of Benjamin's Arcade project; the lines that Virginia Woolf wrote on the surface of a lake with rocks in her pocket; the slam poetry Sylvia Plath recited between huffs of gas; the Beach Boys' SMiLE; the portraits you scrap and lug to bonfires; the transcribed pages of babble and energetic scribbles as glimpsed from the heights of mental pinnacles that are untenable in this world. Moonlight turns to butter in your hands; heavenly messages transform into earthly jive.

Hopper surrounds himself with the stoner rollcall: Peter Fonda, Dean Stockwell, Karen Black, Kris Kristofferson, all hang and hanger on at the orgy...er movie. Amorphous, abstract movies don't bother me: I can lock into dreamtime and maintain if they can, but somewhere along the way, the plot haplessly lost, Hopper attempts to scrape one together. It only turns the Acapulco Gold to lead, weighing The Last Movie down by trying to go straight with some lost gold, digging some Sierra Madre along the way. It only makes the trip that much more of a bummer.

Movies rip holes in the spacetime fabric, create purgatories separate from time, loop without end, and are stocked full of replicas that repeat, re-enact like phantoms do, no longer aware that they are dead. The director acts as high priest, as human conduit for the demigods. Hopper digs all that and reveals such gnostic truths to the movie-going audience. But he then proceeds to get high on his own supply of the sacrosanct sizzurp. "I got plenty in my pants and plenty in my pocket," he slurs at one point. He teaches the natives how to throw John Wayne punches, but they want the real thing: real blood, not karo syrup, real sacrifices, not stuntmen. He can't give that to them and he can;t give that to us. They surround themselves with remnants of Hollywood: bamboo boom mics, paper mache cowboys, phony ponies, until the plywood sets become temples. It starts to look like the set of the Killers' video for "When You Were Young." Perhaps it's even more appropo that the hook goes: "He doesn't look a thing like Jesus." I'd want to string him up, too.

beta and servants

Like some sort of leitmotif in Pierre Michon's Masters and Servants, his narrators often compare paint to honey. Poured gold, pure in sunlight, a viscous substance, an ambrosia, the metaphor sticks. Five stories meditate on the relationship between painter and subject. Starting with Vincent Van Gogh's portraits of Joseph Roulin, Michon muses on a relationship between the two men far from the easel and canvas, be it hunched over glasses with sugarcubes plunked in la Fee Vert, in slurred speech about la republique or an unanswered exchange through the post office. Michon dwells also on Goya, before wading deeper into the despairing nature of painting, to that artistic gesture that fails against the immense face of time, to obscured, non-existent artists who are lost to the centuries, their work warped and destroyed by sun and bonfire, by negligence, by simply being. People can get lost, even when set into that amber...er honey of portraiture.

Going to see my friend Jackie Gendel's exhibit recently, her paint feels more like milk, to where faces seem spilt, diluted, either curdling or evaporating, half and half. Her exhibit is a series of portraits, but the faces would never conjure a specific sitter. The glowing review in New Yorker notes a vegetal palette, stating "the underlying subject, however, isn't the figure or its identity but the process of painting itself, and how...subjects are chameleons who can't make up their minds what gender, setting, or century they inhabit."

Her work devastates me the night I finally get to glimpse them. Nevermind that it's one of the most brutal days I've experienced all year-long. Dealing with a sick family member, with a break-up, with a downpour of rain that soaks me through, by the time I arrive, I feel as if the centrifuge in my mind is about to spin me apart. Walking through the rain, everywhere I look, I see fliers that read: "The female is a chaos." Despite being freshly printed, the paper curls and dissolves in the downpour, to where the appropriated Ezra Pound quote reads like some ancient adage.

Inside, soaked, my white shoes taking on the color of my socks, my shirt clinging to my skin so as to become it, I stare into these hanging portraits. They steal my face and I'm lost in the void of them. Veils of brows, cheeks, lips, eye sockets continually peel away, staged characters and multiple personalities at war. My eyes, anxious, terrified, search in vain for a core, a center to it, a familiar face to reassure me, but none comes forth from her canvasses. I need something to hold onto.

It's a centuries-old struggle to exist, to swim up against the tide of rain and to remain in a place, anyplace. Her portraits (which can all be glimpsed here) embrace both disolution and illumination, the rot and evergreen of this skin, these faces. I can no longer recognize anybody in the gallery, even the face of an old lover turns to that of a stranger. Even milk and honey menaces with such a transformation.

(Her) profile was merging with the foliage, enough in shadow that flesh had become light, a ghost or a thing of the trees...the one whose features we recognize -- the full cheeks and mouth, the long neck and throat -- she sank away at the instant of her cry, disappearing, becoming this superlative creature, exalted and ferocious...more imaginary than angels, but like angels was given glorious body and fabular flesh, and like them let out a sort of exaggerated song.

betalia

A feature on a slew of Italian prog-rock reissues (like Franco Battiato, Lucio Battisti, and Alan Sorrenti) and the Italian that releases them (SF Weekly)

The Dead C 2CD retrospective (The Stranger)

Tortoise and Ike Yard at the new Paper Thin Walls site

jandeta

Beta Blog celebrates Jandek's 47th record release.

When I lived in Austin, there were no markers to memorialize --much less indicate-- that infamous act of public mass murder commited by Charles Whitman on August 1, 1966, when he shot nearly fifty people, killing 15 of them. An expert marksman, Whitman played Trophy Hunter with the student body: some were shot through the mouth, others through plate glass, between pick-up trucks, or while walking out of class or a store. A pregnant woman was shot through the abdomen, killing her unborn child. Students coming across the freshly killed thought they were witnessing guerilla theatre or some sort of psychology experiment until they too were absorbed into the terror of the reality.

I attended the University of Texas at Austin some thirty years on and knew fuck-all about that day. Sure, there remained holes in the buildings' limestone from rifle shots that had never been plastered over in the resulting decades and the tower itself still bears nodes from where good ol' boys lugged out their pistols and hunting irons to fire back. Unspoken so as to be forgot, silent so as to soothe that disquieting sound that is the echoing crack of a deer rifle's thunder, all but one trace of the man remained: it loomed over the entire landscape, glowed in the darkness of every night, both seen and unseen.

It's only in reading the oral history that comprises the newest issue of Texas Monthly that the day comes back into the light. Having come of age so as to be within the state lines during such atrocities as the Branch-Davidian Compound killings, the Luby's Massacre in Killeen, Texas, such public mass murder (to say nothing of the words "going postal" entering the vernacular) shockingly enough seemed normal in that state. Despite being knee-deep in the bloody mud of Viet Nam, the quaint smalltownness of Austin that is evoked herein is almost unimaginable. It tells of a time before EMS, before SWAT teams (the transportation of the dead was still handled by funeral parlors; tactical police teams were basically invented in the aftermath of Whitman). The Mayberry-ness of the Drag's storefronts (which border the west end of the campus) at that time and are fondly recalled here are as dead as the boho one captured thirty years on by Richard Linklater in Slacker. Both of these previous realities are now polished smooth by the Urban Outfitters and Barnes & Nobles.

"Whitman was blond, good-looking, solidly built. I remember he seemed like a nice, clean-cut, all-American kind of guy," one recounts. Which is shorthand for saying he was a jock-asshole, but one of the thousands that still populate the university. The legend goes that an undiagnosed brain tumor waas the what made him ascend those stairs, though its more plausiable his amphetamine intake had more than a little to do with it. But what makes an All-American man see the world in a new, disturbing, isolated manner? What makes him create his own harrowing universe where he is the only inhabitant, the only assailant, the lone gunman?

Portrait of Whitman as a Young Man.

Seven years previous to the exact month, Texas Monthly ran an article about that enigmatic figure who still haunts the subconscious of Texas music, Jandek. Read about his legend elsewhere, or else watch Jandek on Corwood, but know this: music is not public, but extremely private; it grows and festers inside your skull. At that time, it was a shock to the esoteric music community of Texas that some blonde chick, as oppposed to some bespectacled cllector scum, had tracked him down and (gulp) had a beer with him. He lives as an anonymous normal businessman in Houston: black tie, black suit, with no explanation for the madness of the music that results, save that it's kin to growing snap peas. It made Charalambides' Christina Carter weep.

In much the same way that the ghost-white cassettes of Daniel Johnston floated at the periphery of the memory of Austinites, revealing to those with ears this devastating world that almost anyone could fall into if they but stepped towards the monolith, it was the same for Houston's denizens. One musician friend recalls flipping through record after record of this shirtless, bony man, seeing this parallel world evoked in blurry Kodachrome of pork-chop portraiture, backyards, wood-plank houses, cheap crepuscular drum kits, yet always flipping past them. And as Dante has Beatrice and Johnston has Laurie, Jandek has Nancy.

It would be tidy to suggest that in the forty years since the Whitman shootings there, have been forty Jandek records, except that with the release of Glasgow Monday/ The Cell, Janky's now on his 47th, a double disc of piano and whispers, contrabass and tuned toms. Perhaps he aims instead to make as many records as there were bullets that day?

He was one of those guys who got red-faced when he was upset, and he was very flushed when he walked in the door. He was carrying an architectural drawing that I suppose he wanted to show me, but the moment he saw that I had a baby grand in my living room, he dropped his papers, sat down, and played “Claire de Lune.” It’s a fairly tough little tune to play, but he did it beautifully. Then he played something else, though I don’t remember what. When all that red had drained out of his face, he stood up. I said, “Well, I’ll see you in class tomorrow, Charlie.” He said, “Okay,” and left.

Reading the Whitman article by day, I screen the DVD release of Glasgow Sunday, his live public debut, in the night. The thought that there would ever come to pass a time when there would be a concert video of Jandek seemed as likely as meeting your own skeleton. Never shall that twain meet. And yet, that skeleton stands before us now, a face to our own mortality. Its bones clang, both heard and seen. The warm flesh that is music is riddled now with worms, hanging from those arms.

In early September of 1961 he was standing on the seventh-floor balcony of the Goodall Wooten dorm, looking at the Tower, when he turned to a friend and said, “You know, that would be a great place to go up with a rifle and shoot people. You could hold off an army for as long as you wanted.” He wasn’t like you or me; instead of seeing the Tower, he saw a fortress. Instead of rain spouts, he saw gun turrets.

Finally witnessing this wraith-like figure, so unknowable yet familiar after decades of seeing his face on records that accrue and read like so many "Missing" bulletins on a curdled milk carton, like an innocent time killed on scalding hot pavement, he appears ancient, ageless. When he strums that first black note here, making adepts like Richard Youngs and Alex Neilson scurry to keep up with him, Jandek is resurrected as the last of the Texas bluesmen (or at least the dessicated corpse of Stevie Ray Vaughn). His tuning untempered, sensical and orderly only in his mind, the arrythmic tick of his heart untappable by others, his band scrambles to tie the skeleton back together. If Mance Lipscomb or Lightnin' Hopkins had played after their skin fell off the bone, it would've sounded as prophetic as Six and Six. The difference being that when Jandek saw a guitar, he saw not an instrument to affirm life (and the blues do embrace and celebrate this earth), but something that instead resounds with encroaching death, an instrument that is a wooden box, as hollow as its occupant.

beta renovatur

Giacinto Scelsi - Natura Renovatur
My last piece with Lindsey Thomas, my editor in Minneapolis, regarding a figure I'd dreamed of writing about for years. If it's my last ride, it was a sweet one.

Rub'n'Tug - Campfire
Unfortunately, there was no room to insert the word "key" into "bumping'n'grinding," but I guess that it'd just make for a redundant coke joke.

Howard Tate - A Portrait of Howard
If only I had kept in mind Howard's maxim to "get it while you can," perhaps my heart wouldn't be in such a state.

betiver

Dig the Vetiver "box set" in the back.

Vetiver - Find Me Gone

Two recent gospel comps on Soul Jazz and Numero Group that allow me to quote Mike McGonigal and make Jesus jokes, but not the other way around.

Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan
Mark Fosson - The Lost Takoma Sessions (scroll down)

As my Vetiver piece no doubt attests, I have surprised myself by being wholly impressed with the newest. This after finding the first album ho-hum and subsequently missing Cabic's set at the Bowery. It probably didn't help matters that I detested co-hort Devendra Banhart's last one (and let's not mention the reggae 12"), but the craftsmanship and interplay here is delectable. And rather than being like a hairshirt, Cabic's increased Bolanisms are as comforting as an old, threadbare tee, breezy, worn, but perfect for the summer. Almost everyone I've chatted to about this album (meaning Grizzly Bear and uh...Chris Robinson) also digs it, so it's not just the bourbonade talking here.

And do I ever feel foolish for missing all fourteen of those "Forever Changes performed in its entirety" Arthur Lee & Love gigs that came through the past five years or so. Maybe I should've gone to Os Mutantes to bathe in such faded light, too, lest it extinguish on this earth? Yet missing Arthur feels like part and parcel for the Love experience. Unappreciated (or should it just be unrequited?), Forever Changes was lost on ears with its ellipses, syncopes, word games, ever-sprawling California roads and open-ended forever chord changes. MacLean was cold in the ground by the time of MOJO's black magick revival, and did they ever unearth Johnny Echols? Either way, a bummer in the summer...

beta clips

The Corrupted - El Mundo Frio

CSS - Cansei de Ser Sexy

A last minute feature on Ben Chasny/ Six Organs of Admittance. The final quote has resounded with me recently, as I think and act upon my own art. While I often think of the work as being about preservation or setting into amber thoughts and experiences, perhaps it really is an exorcism, an extraction. What's the quote about letting out that which resides inside you so that you may live? And if it is not freed, then that same force will destroy you?

beta nice up de dub

On The Congos and Friends, African Roots, and the Rhythm & Sound Remixes

On the Jamaica to Toronto compilation

When I was out in Portland, on a day touching 102 degrees, Mike McGonigal and I agreed that the only bearable music in such heat radiates from the isle of Jamaica: ska, rocksteady, dub, roots reggae. Now back in New York, I dust off the discs I have accrued for such dog days and spin them in the properly humid hell of Babylon, my face holding beads of sweat races. Somehow, my body heat is tempered, assuaged and cooled by discs like Barrington Levy’s criminally unreleased sessions with King Tubbys, Blackbeard's brain-melting dub sets like Strictly Dubwize and the absurd I Wah Dub, Junior Murvin's epochal Police & Thieves, the forthcoming Noel Ellis showcase that Light in the Attic is putting out, among innumerable others.

Funny how different the dub sounds when it does not emanate from the isle of Jamaica. Even as I argue about how dub music can suspend the spacetime continuum in the Stranger piece, you can immediately hear when the dub booms out from another locus. Sure, Wackies crumbling showcases make heads imagine what the Black Ark would sound like had it not burnt to a crisp, but that grit and soot, those cymbals like steam blasts, the percussion like steel wheels, those oily puddles of bass and snare could only come from a place as filthy as NYC. England's dubs, be it lovers rock or the whacked-out experimentation of On-U Sound's Adrian Sherwood and Dennis Bovell, are instantly identifiable with their Englishness, neatness, and crisp production techniques. No baking the tapes in the razor grass and cane or blowing marijuana across the oxide here, but maybe a splash of tea on it.

So the reggae of Toronto is particularly beguiling to hear now. It's hard to pinpoint, be it the unearthed scene that LITA is reissuing or else those saccharine strings that Studio One legend Jackie Mittoo glopped all over his joints (to reach out to Canuck heads like the MacKenzie Brothers), to understand what makes the sound so singular, but the dubs made by people like Oswald Creary and Jerry Brown are distinct. They got that gluey bass down, to where when Mittoo was doing a session up in London, he got on the horn to try and capture that bass sound that Brown could get at Summer Sound Studios. Yet the Canadian joints couldn't get airplay, to where, as Jerry Brown told me, they would write on the label "Made in Jamaica" so as to dupe the DJs into some spins. It certainly helped them break "Rockin' Universally." And yet the dubs are imbued with the quicker metabolism of northern big city life; biorhythms move quicker, something that the dub can't help but to catch in its stickiness.

radio beta

On the Beta radio yesterday, driving to the house of god:

Nelly Furtado "I'm Loose"
This is some crazy on-air joint from a 6CD set of every take on what would be shoved down our goddamned throats in '06 as the summertime jam "Promiscuous." On the original, Furtado mewls the Iggster's original words about riding along on a big fat weenie that's slick and greasy. Fuck, I'm sick of this mash-up. I may as well listen to it 30 times in a row on one CD, as that's what it's like on the dial.

Whatever that Cam'ron and Lil' Wayne joint is where they hang like scarecrows geting some brain. Rote and phoned in, but whatevs.

Supertramp "The Logical Song"
The co-pilot gushes aloud about what the hell happened to Supertramp. "I was just talking about them at my buddy's barbeque last weekend." He swears they were "so huge" back when. "And wait, this is the best part." He cranks up the volume as the wonky sax part kicks in, suddenly realizing I'm in a van full of rockists. But I wait for it and then there it is: these bizarre bleeps right in the middle of the brass wailing. "It's the sound of one of those Collecovision football games," he tells me. I want to make it my ringtone.

Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway
It's what the God listens to.

The best story R. Allah tells is a story about his mother being a singer, and his aunt, R. Brown. He would watch her get ready for a show at the Cotton Club, sewing up her gown and placing sequins on it and her shoes. "I'd just be eating Slim Jims watching her prepare. You'd have never known she was about to go perform, just cool as a cucumber. "

New York Dolls "Personality Crisis"
Almost swerve off the road into a pine tree when I hear the New York Dolls on rock radio. Admire how ragged and rasped Buster Pointdexter sounded back then before his sex change, as both the band and my vehicle careen around in high hills. S/He sounded ancient back then, which explains how this also fits in with the whole Harry Smith project as well. And then the thirty-year-old fishnets shred and I realize that the Dolls are live in the studio tearing into it. I really shouldn't be behind the wheel now. The on-air personality gushes that you can hear that the Dolls are "just having fun up there."

beta pics

Since these thingys are worth a thousand words, it means it should make up for weeks of lame updates, I reckon (as well as showing off the new camera I had to buy on vacation):




Salif Keita at Brooklyn Metrotech, delivering an exquisite set of Malinese classics for all the grandmothers, little kids, this one mother rubbing her pregnant belly in tune to the beatific beat, and the baldheaded freaks in attendance.




Paintings at the Disjecta loft space in Portland, Oregon. It will be the site for the Mike McGonigal-curated Halleluwah Fest come early September, featuring Vashti Bunyan, Sir Richard Bisop, Deerhoof, and others. Should be sweet.




Oren Ambarchi, Boris, and Sunn O)))

beta clips

Ugh, I know, I know, this really has just been turning into a 'clips' site for the past few weeks, hasn't it?

Syd Barrett obituary

Oneida - Happy New Year

This Heat - Out of Cold Storage

beta eats

Since music critics pondering food is all the rage, I decided to take a taste myself:

on Doughnuts in Seattle

on Doughnuts in Portland

on Raw Kombucha

on Japanese candy

shotgun beta

Willie Nelson - The Complete Atlantic Sessions

Sound Team - "Movie Monster"

Public Image Limited - Metal Box reissue
(and further down, me on the recent Sublime Frequencies set)

Jose Gonzalez - Veneer + The Knife - Silent Shout

beta kills pigs, cops, vegan loaves

The legendary hardcore band, Millions of Dead Cops! No, really! At a vegan potluck!

There have been two occasions where I almost moved to Portland, Oregon; I may move here yet. It helps that every time I visit the Pacific Northwest, the weather is beatific, almost staggering in its clarity, the sky an impossible blue. This go-round, it really is staggering, as global warming makes the place resemble Texas. Today, it nears 100. Tomorrow it will touch 102. The highway sizzles, windows rolled down to let the hot asphalt winds whip across us as we ride. It evokes the classic Texas roadtrips that we used to take.

Upon arrival in Portland, we decide to visit some old Texas friends. Unable to realize their dreams of manning a deli in New York City, they now run a vegan bodega in SE Portland. Food Fight, scarcely two years on, has grown into a nexus for varying scenes, causes, and it looks like they have created a strong base for themselves, which thrills me to no end. A grocery store that stages reading and rallies while also stocking every sort of mystery non-meat you can imagine.

A recent cause involves raising funds to pay for the ever-mounting legal fees for the Shac 7, who stand to face an endless federal trial as 'terrorists.' I won't go into too much detail here, especially when you can read more about their plight here, but it realizes the horror visions of Kafka (must admit that reading W.G. Sebald's Vertigo has been putting me into a K-hole recently). For those that think that terrorists only exist beyond the borders and wear turbans, the Christian Fascists would like you to reconsider and remain silent, which only helps them crucify harmless citizens who merely posit ideas on the web. Soooo...back to the music, then.

On this day, there's a huge freak scene happening at Food Fight. We make our way through a bizarre throng of anarchists and ladies with faded facial tatts, and only inside do I realize that we are in the midst of a hot and sweaty vegan potluck. Anarchists are in muumuus and there's even a reunion show of hallowed hardcore punk band, Millions of Dead Cops!

Being a music writer, I've grown jaded with exclusive shows, but this is something else entirely. One Dave is a recovering speedfreak, while the other Dave is a recovering carb addict, baking his own brand, Dave's Killer Bread.

They may also be Bread fans, as this is an acoustic reunion show. I spy a pair of bongos, but don't see them get babbalooed. Instead, they offer whispery, quickly strummed versions of their back catalog and maybe the worst version of "Happy Birthday" ever attempted. Unplugged highlights include "Corporate Death Burger" and "Kill All the Cops." The latter is so catchy that the kids sing it in the car over and over again. It sounds better than both Mr. T Experience and Raffi, while also carrying an important message for all kids to learn.

baet simpson

My host Marshall in Eugene, Oregon informs me that it's actually Springfield I am in, and that neighboring Springfield, Oregon is actually Shelbyville. The town square does indeed bear a vague resemblance. Look to the odd pioneer statues of one Eugene Skinner, to the preserved homestead of the man that stands near the Willamette River. By the muddy banks, I fully unravel and feel the vacation kicking in; hours pass just watching the patterns that leaves make in the wind, dappling sunlight and shade across my chest as I sprawl in the soft grasses and read or else stare into the sunny sky. The grass is different in Oregon. (Uh, not that kind.) In Texas, the landscape accosts you like cops do; stickers and burrs gouge, there are sharp crenations of weeds. The blades themselves make you itch. And where there aren't mosquito swarms doing fly-bys, there is always the threat of being brutalized and burned by fire ants. Plopped down in the grass here, all feels benevolent. And I don't even need to pull out a hackey sack or digeridoo.

Staying with Marshall is mind-boggling in a way; he played such a crucial role in my development and appreciation of music when I was sixteen years old that it's hard to believe that were still in touch a decade hence. Were it not for him and his band, El Santo (who will always be my favorite group next to Nirvana), I might've never made the connection that music is actually made by people, and not these distant, untouchable entities.

Guess that is punk rock's most profound lesson. As a child growing up, you usually interact with popular music on a completely alienated, wholly untenable level: here are these peculiarly-dressed people that you will never have a chance to meet. This is what you think rebellion looks and sounds like. But it is a lie outright. You know no one that even looks like them in either your extended family or at your school, despite what the Goths and heshers may appropriate as their 'style.' These strangers make a highly-stylized music that the major label record company then sells you at the mall. I grew up listening to Poison, to G'n'R, to Beastie Boys, but no one in my realm of existence bore even a remote resemblance to these figures.

There's an early piece I wrote for Pitchfork about a lost mixtape that may hint at yet barely makes explicit just how important Marshall (and his immense record collection) was for me. Interacting with him as an aspiring guitarist and music fiend was paramount for making music a part of my everyday existence. There is a flame of gnosis to be attained or to lose to the annihilations of time, and I can think of no other person’s tastes and wide approach to listening that influenced me more in this regard.

So it's strange to be here on vacation, the iPod tucked away, with zero interest in proactively listening to music with Marshall and his family. Sure, I've been digging, thrilled to find this Eddie Kendricks record I’ve spent three years searching for as well as Goblin's OOP soundtrack for Suspiria, but I'm in no hurry to audition them now. Instead, random records plucked at recent yard sales get put on during our days together as we do chores, dress the kids, get ready for bike rides. There’s some fine bluegrass picking record called White Lightnin', a synth-heavy Tony Allen record from '84, some unpronounceable African record with a triangle player, some Mexican kiddie-pop, a schizophrenic Nitty Gritty Dirt Band record before they realized how much they loved Merle Travis, an incredible French accordion-jazz record with an R. Crumb cover, and some Thin Lizzy (okay that's my pick). The kids only want to hear one record though: Mr. T Experience. Listening to Milk Milk Lemonade and this record with a Lite Brite on the cover, seeing how neat-o the red vinyl looks as it spins, it never occurred to me that Lookout!s true record-buying contingency was in reality kindergarteners (hence the longevity of Green Day?). Now I realize this shit's way more fun than Raffi.

Eugene's other claim to notoriety is being the location for Animal House. Of course, said house has been torn down, to where only some dorm rooms remain. The best joke of the whole town though is the location of the Planned Parenthood offices: it's on the corner of 17 & High.

reality betas

In a way, I'm glad that the jewelry store isn't open when I rush over there as if to complete all my chores before my flight. My watch battery remains unfixed, my inability to either manage or be on-time has a really great excuse now, even as I try to catch a plane. What it means though is that I can no longer gauge how long we sit on the runway, how long the flight takes, much less how long my enormous layover in Denver is. Too tired to do the math when I finally arrive in Seattle, let's just presume it's been a long fucking day and by not affixing a number to it, perhaps my jetlag won't take hold.

(As life can't help but creep into the work, I realize two upcoming pieces make mention of "time," how these dissimilar artists both disavow and deny it, their music contesting such tides. A lyrical genius says (not sings, mind you): "Time will take care of itself, so just leave time alone.")

Upon landing, I somehow find my way to a Seattle restaurant that does not serve espresso at 11pm, but the sushi is killer, even if they gild the lily a little. Even though I write in up to seven cities, I've really only ever spent time in one of them. Cranking out pieces in a little green room, linking to such articles online, receiving printed checks in the mail, these places just seem like distant clips from Shangri-La or something. Now Seattle is a reality.

Being at a rock show in a new town makes me feel slightly anthropological as I look around at the new settings, the new kids and what their outfits are here. In the daylight, the town seems to really dig shows. Scores of fliers abound, everyone from Prince Paul to Buck 65 to Black Angels to Jose Gonzalez (and holy shit! there's also a flier for Love Battery) flapping along walls and lampposts. Stacks of the Stranger and Seattle Weekly are in nearly every shop doorway. Getting on the bus, I see people reading the weeklies. Perhaps because there is so much more competition for eyes as in New York, where you can also choose between New York, New Yorker, TONY, and (for the sickos out there) NY Press.

For the first time ever, I actually step inside the offices of one of my employers, the Stranger. Dig through the archives to see my words in newsprint; it has that same sort of rush as when I head to the street corner on Tuesday night to find my words in the newest Voice, despite the ink not being fresh any longer.

I'm not here so much for business, but for vacation. I spend the morning taking care of my interview so as to enjoy the sensations of being in a new city. The sky is milky with clouds to where every corner and building front stands out vividly in the skyline. Yes, Seattle is a bustling metropolis, but I notice more space between the noises now, to where once the bus rumbles past, nothing really takes its place. It's an increase of silence, a calm so hard to parse back home. Call it an unclenching on my part, even as I down as much espresso as I can at every opportunity. The only thing that occurs more often today than such sipping is overhearing references to Reality Bites and Singles.

beta from the canyon

"The Circle Game": A feature on Numero Group's Ladies from the Canyon compilation in LA Weekly

Espers - II

The Black Angels - Passover

And, should you wish to read the piece I wrote about Jackie Mittoo bumping reggae at a mall in Toronto, you can peep the Rick Ross ish of The Fader or else uh...download the rag as a podcast.

beta power

In a recent New Yorker article, Samuel Hynes recalls a line Ezra Pound says to him when they happen upon each other in a park: "It's difficult hanging on to the truth while admitting error." It stings especially so as a critic, where your opined words must remain sharp and 'right,' rigid and affixed on a page that floats about in an influx world, where perception necessarily must give and be pliant, ever-changing. I wasn't the only one underwhelmed by Cat Power's The Greatest, finding it to be too shorn of its edges. Where were the jags, the bared edges, the emotional upheavals and artistic crises that flow about her so readily, her destabilized persona suddenly a part of her presentation?

You'd have to be crazy to go see her live though, or at least a sucker for disappointment. If you know anything about her proclivity to melt and disintegrate before her fawning audience, to flub every song, to drop lines, to forget chord changes, to painfully abort the same song ten times in a row, she is already a legend. Snickers no doubt followed the sudden announcement earlier this year that she had cancelled all of her tour dates with the Memphis band due to "health issues." And even with the tour re-scheduled (which was good news for me, as my piece finally ran out in Seattle), I can't help but cop to sniggering in the audience as well. Her reputation preceding her and all that, I still couldn't turn down free tickets to her show at Town Hall.

My friend and I stood outside the doors as the band started up, downing our mixed drinks in the lobby quickly and wondering aloud why we couldn't hear Cat Power at all as the band continued to blare and throb. Only some three songs in did Chan pad across the stage barefoot to sing about how she once wanted to be "the greatest." Resigned to mortality, she flexed, showing off sculpted arms as bodily example, as living proof. That said, her voice was thin and watery compared to the belts of her backing singers, taking some three songs before the sound guy reached some sort of compromise, finally highlighting the fuzz and smoke inherent in her throat while turning down the piquant power of the ladies near the back curtain.

By that time of sonic balance, I was hooked, intoxicated by the pulse of the twelve-piece band and their deft though loose grip, all musical forms understood as they moved with her, accentuating her awkward hip shakes with a more bold and knowing shimmy and slink, which in turn emboldened her, comforted her. The group comprised everyone from pedal steel player Doug Easley and Teenie Hodges to three strings and two horns, two singers. What sounded so polished to the point of listlessness on record brightened under the stage lights. The opulence was undeniable live, and as Chan piped out midway through, she was alive as well. "Sober! Happy!" she intoned, making hand gestures and hopping about like a bunny. Or a teen girl infatuated with "Some Girls" and chicken-walking like Mick before her make-up mirror. She also continually made gestures as to a queef (not sure what to make of that).

When the band finally dissolved and disappeared during "Where is My Love?" (its heartbreaking plaint bittersweet live), Cat Power tiptoed back out in a tight white dress to melt Sandy Denny's "Who Know Where the Time Goes" into a spot-on impression of (who else) Nina Simone's own 1959 Town Hall concert (a poster announces daughter Simone's own impression is forthcoming) with "Wild is the Wind." Perhaps to prove her pianistic powers are crescent, she lets ring into the void between each note her own take on "Dreams" with Elvis's melancholic "Blue Moon" perfectly interloped, the ghost of dead American astronauts alive and a-glow inside her. She even undercuts her own prowess with an off-the-cuff version of "Hit the Road, Jack" that fizzles. The only song of the past is the last, "I Don't Blame You." So she does understand just how she makes us both doubt and believe, making us grapple with such truths and errors with her every breath.